The wait is finally over. KDE 4.1 is now in the official portage repos­i­tory, which means that Gentoo users can upgrade to it without having to unmask any packages or setting up an overlay.

I upgraded to the new and shiny KDE 4.1 today for the first time. I could have easily gotten it from an overlay a long time ago, but then I figured it was best to wait for it to mature. Like its prede­cessor (KDE 3.5), this version of KDE looks quite unpol­ished until you spend some time customizing it. For instance, I cannot fathom the reasons behind not enabling font anti-aliasing by default. Without this tweak, all fonts look jagged and ugly. KDE also seems to have taken the path of Microsoft’s Windows Vista in terms of its color scheme: gray and black seem to be the norm.

Overall, I am not too disap­pointed with the upgrade, but I realize now that I’m going to have to wait for future releases for many pieces of function­ality that I used to love in KDE. This is one of the downsides of having software redesigned from scratch. For instance, Amarok 2 (still in beta) included in this version of KDE, is missing several key features, such as track-queuing and equal­izer support. I just wish the KDE devel­opers had focused on having a 4.1 release that was on par with 3.5.10 in terms of features, rather than worry about the details.